Life of John Keats Part 15

Peona went Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.

The poem ends on no such note of joy and triumph over the attained consummation as we might have expected and such as we found at the close of the third book, at the point where the faculty and vision of the poet had been happily enriched and completed by the gift of the learning and beneficence of the sage. The fourth book closes, as it began, in a minor key, leaving the reader, like Peona, in a mood rather musing than rejoicing. Is this because Keats had tired of his task before he came to the end, or because the low critical opinion of his own work which he had been gradually forming took the heart out of him, so that as he drew near the goal he involuntarily let his mind run on the hindrances and misgivings which beset the poetic aspirant on his way to victory more than on the victory itself? Or was it partly because of the numbing influence of early winter as recorded in the last chapter? We cannot tell.

But why take all this trouble, the reader may well have asked before now, to follow the argument and track the wanderings of Endymion book by book, when everyone knows that the poem is only admirable for its incidental beauties and is neither read nor well readable for its story?

The answer is that the intricacy and obscurity of the narrative, taken merely as a narrative, are such as to tire the patience of many readers in their search for beautiful pa.s.sages and to dull their enjoyment of them when found; but once the inner and symbolic meanings of the poem are recognized, even in gleams, their recognition gives it a quite new hold upon the attention. And in order to trace these meanings and disengage them with any clearness a fairly close examination and detailed argument are necessary. It is not with simple matters of personification, of the putting of initial capitals to abstract qualities, that we have to deal, nor yet with any obvious and deliberately thought-out allegory; still less is it with one purposely made riddling and obscure; it is with a vital, subtly involved and pa.s.sionately tentative spiritual parable, the parable of the experiences of the poetic soul in man seeking communion with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world, invented and related, in the still uncertain dawn of his powers, by one of the finest natural-born and intuitively gifted poets who ever lived. This is a thing which stands almost alone in literature, and however imperfectly executed is worth any closeness and continuity of attention we can give it. Having now studied, to the best of our power, the sources and scheme of the poem, with its symbolism and inner meanings so far as they can with any confidence be traced, let us pa.s.s to the consideration of its technical and poetical qualities and its relation to the works of certain other poets and poems of Keats's time.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the old Grecian world, the Endymion myth, or rather an Endymion myth, for like other myths it had divers forms, was rooted deeply in the popular traditions both of Elis in the Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The central feature of the Carian legend was the nightly descent of the moon-G.o.ddess Selene to kiss her lover, the shepherd prince Endymion, where he lay spell-bound, by the grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. This legend was early crystallized in a lyric poem of Sappho now lost, and thereafter became part of the common heritage of Greek and Roman popular mythology. The separate moon-G.o.ddess, Selene for the Greeks and Luna for the Romans, got merged in course of time in the multiform divinities of the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana respectively; so that in modern literatures derived from the Latin it is always of Diana (or what is the same thing, of Cynthia or Phoebe) that the tale is told. It is not given at length in any of our extant cla.s.sical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and in Cicero and some of the late Greek prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias.

From these it pa.s.sed at the Renaissance into the current European stock of cla.s.sical imagery and reference.

[2] In another place, Browne makes Endymion shut out from the favour of Cynthia stand figuratively for Raleigh in disgrace with Elizabeth: just as in Lyly's comedy the myth had been turned into an allegory of contemporary court intrigue, with Elizabeth for Cynthia, Leicester for Endymion, Tellus for Mary Queen of Scots, Eumenides for Sidney, and so forth.

[3] _Endymion_, iii. 196-209.

[4] _Endymion_, ii. 569-572 and 908-916.

[5] _Metam._ i. 26-31, Englished thus by Sandys:--

Forthwith upsprung the quick and weightless Fire, Whose flames unto the highest Arch aspire: The next, in levity and peace, is Air: Gross elements to thicker Earth repair Self-clogg'd with weight: the Waters flowing round Possess the last, and solid Tellus bound.

[6] Keats was more widely read in out-of-the-way French literature than could have been expected from his opportunities, and there are pa.s.sages in _Endymion_ which run closely parallel to Gombauld's romance, notably the first apparition of Cynthia, with the description of her hair (_End._ i, 605-618), and the account of the sudden distaste which afterwards seizes him for former pleasures and companions. But these may be mere coincidences, and the whole series of the hero's subsequent adventures according to Gombauld, his dream-flight to the Caspian under the spell of the Thessalian enchantress Ismene, and all the weird things that befall him there, are entirely unlike anything that happens in Keats's poem.

[7] The authority for this story is the late Sir B. W. Richardson, professing to quote verbatim as follows from Mr Stephens' own statement to him in conversation.

'One evening in the twilight, the two students sitting together, Stephens at his medical studies, Keats at his dreaming, Keats breaks out to Stephens that he has composed a new line:--

A thing of beauty is a constant joy.

"What think you of that, Stephens?" "It has the true ring, but is wanting in some way," replies the latter, as he dips once more into his medical studies. An interval of silence, and again the poet:--

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

"What think you of that, Stephens?" "That it will live for ever."'

The conversation as thus related at second hand reads certainly as though it had been more or less dressed up for effect, but we cannot suppose the circ.u.mstance to have been wholly invented. A careful reading of the first twenty-four lines of _Endymion_ will show that they have close affinities with much both in _Sleep and Poetry_ and '_I stood tip-toe_' in thought as well as style, and especially in their manner of bringing together, by reason of the common property of beauty, things otherwise so unlike as the cloak of weeds which rivulets are conceived as making to keep themselves cool in summertime (compare '_I stood tip-toe_' II. 80-84) musk-roses in a woodland brake (compare _Sleep and Poetry_ I. 5), the life of great spirits after death, and beautiful stories in general. My own inference is that Keats, having written these two dozen lines some time in 1816, used them the next spring as a suitable exordium for _Endymion_, and added the following lines, 25-33, as a (somewhat clumsy) transition to the actual beginning of the poem 'Therefore with full happiness,' etc., as written at Carisbrooke.

[8] There is a certain, though slight enough, resemblance between some of these underground incidents and those which happen in a romance of travel, which Keats may very well have read, the _Voyage d'Antenor_, then popular both in France and in an English translation. Antenor is permitted by the Egyptian priests to pa.s.s through the triple ordeal by fire, water, and air contrived by them in the vast subterranean vaults under the temple of Osiris. The points of most resemblance are the suspended guiding light seen from within the entrance, the rus.h.i.+ng of the water streams, and the ascent by a path between bal.u.s.trades. The _Voyage d'Antenor_ was itself founded on an earlier and much rarer French romance, _Sethos_, and both were freely and avowedly imitated by Thomas Moore in his prose tale, the _Epicurean_ (1827). Mr Robert Bridges has noticed a point in common between _Endymion_ and the _Epicurean_ in the sudden breaking off or crumbling away of the bal.u.s.trade under the wayfarer's feet. This does not occur in _Sethos_ or _Antenor_, and was probably borrowed by Moore from Keats.

[9] How familiar, both with the text and the translator's commentary, is proved by his adopting as his own, almost literally, a phrase which Sandys brings in by way of ill.u.s.trative comment from the _Imagines_ (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of Philostratus. Philostratus, coming to a picture of Glaucus, tells how the painter had given him 'thick and arched eyebrows which touched one another.' Keats writes,--

his snow-white brows _Went arching up_, and like two magic ploughs Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large.

It was the look and expression of Keats in reciting this same phrase, the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found himself vividly recalling it thirty years later (see above, p. 144).

[10] Mr Mackail sees in this sh.e.l.l and its secret characters a reminiscence of the mystic sh.e.l.l, which is also a book, carried in the right hand of the sheikh who is also Don Quixote in the dream narrated by Wordsworth in the third book of _The Prelude_. I owe so very much of the interpretation above attempted to Mr Mackail that I am bound to record his opinion: but as I shall show later (p. 251), it is scarcely possible that any pa.s.sages from _The Prelude_ should have come to Keats's knowledge until after _Endymion_ was finished.

[11] Ovid, _Metam._ xiii, 810-840; Theocr. _Idyll_. xi, 30 _sqq._

CHAPTER VII

_ENDYMION._--II. THE POETRY: ITS QUALITIES AND AFFINITIES

Revival of Elizabethan usages--Avoidance of closed couplets--True metrical instincts--An example--Rime too much his master--Lax use of words--Flaws of taste and training--Faults and beauties inseparable--Homage to the moon--A parallel from Drayton--Examples of nature-poetry--Nature and the Greek spirit--Greek mythology revitalized--Its previous deadness--Poetry of love and war--Dramatic promise--Comparison with models--Sandys's _Ovid--Hymn to Pan_: Chapman--Ben Jonson--The hymn in _Endymion_--'A pretty piece of paganism'--Song of the Indian maiden--The triumph of Bacchus--A composite: its sources--English scenery and detail--Influence of Wordsworth--Influence of Sh.e.l.ley--_Endymion_ and _Alastor_--Correspondences and contrasts--_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_--Sh.e.l.ley on _Endymion_--Keats and Clarence's dream--Sh.e.l.ley a borrower--Sh.e.l.ley and the rimed couplet.

Throughout the four books of _Endymion_ we find Keats still working, more even than in his epistles and meditations of the year before, under the spell of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetry. Spenser and the Spenserians, foremost among them William Browne; Drayton in his pastorals and elegies; Shakespeare, especially in his early poems and comedies; Fletcher and Ben Jonson in pastoral and lyrical work like _The Faithful Shepherdess_ or _The Sad Shepherd_; Chapman's version of Homer, especially the _Odyssey_ and the _Hymns_, and Sandys's of the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid; these are the masters and the models of whom we feel his mind and ear to be full. In their day the English language had been to a large extent unfixed, and in their instinctive efforts to enrich and expand and supple it, poets had enjoyed a wide range of freedom both in maintaining old and in experimenting with new usages.

Many of the liberties they used were renounced by the differently minded age which followed them, and the period from the Restoration, roughly speaking, to the middle years of George III had in matters of literary form and style been one of steadily tightening restriction and convention. Then ensued the period of expansion, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott had been the most conspicuous leaders, each after his manner, in reconquering the freedom of poetry. Other innovators had followed suit, including Leigh Hunt in that slippered, sentimental, Italianate fas.h.i.+on of his own. And now came young Keats, not following closely along the paths opened by any of these, though closer to Leigh Hunt than to the others, but making a deliberate return to certain definite and long abandoned usages of the English poets during the ill.u.s.trious half century from 1590-1640. He chose the heroic couplet, and in handling it reversed the settled practice of more than a century.

He was even more sedulous than any of his Elizabethan or Jacobean masters to achieve variety of pause and movement by avoiding the regular beat of the closed couplet; while in framing his style he did not scruple to revive all or nearly all those licences of theirs which the intervening age had disallowed. There was a special rashness in his attempt considering the slightness of his own critical equipment, and considering also the strength of the long riveted fetters which he undertook to break and the charges of affectation and impertinence which such a revival of obsolete metrical and verbal usages--the marks of what Pope had denounced as 'our rustic vein And splay-foot verse'--was bound to bring against him.

First of his revolutionary treatment of the metre. He no longer uses double or feminine endings, as in his epistles of the year before, with a profusion like that of _Britannia's Pastorals_. They occur, but in moderation, hardly more than a score of them in any one of the four books. At the beginning he tries often, but afterwards gives up, an occasional trick of the Elizabethan and earlier poets in riming on the unstressed second syllables of words such as 'dancing' (rimed with 'string'), 'elbow' (with 'slow'), 'velvet' (with 'set'), 'purplish'

(with 'fish'). On the other hand he regularly resolves the 'tion' or 's.h.i.+on' termination into its full two syllables, the last carrying the rime, as--'With speed of five-tailed exhalations:' 'Before the deep intoxication;' 'Vanish'd in elemental pa.s.sion;' and the like. He admits closed couplets, but very grudgingly, as a general rule in the proportion of not more than one to eight or ten of the unclosed. He seldom allows himself even so much of a continuous run of them as this:--

Moreover, through the dancing poppies stole A breeze most softly lulling to my soul; And shaping visions all about my sight Of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light; The which became more strange, and strange, and dim, And then were gulph'd in a tumultuous swim:

Or this:--

So in that crystal place, in silent rows, Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes.-- The stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac'd Such thousands of shut eyes in order plac'd; Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips All ruddy,--for here death no blossom nips.

He mark'd their brows and foreheads; saw their hair Put sleekly on one side with nicest care.

The essential principle of his versification is to let sentences, prolonged and articulated as freely and naturally as in prose, wind their way in and out among the rimes, the full pause often splitting a couplet by falling at the end of the first line, and oftener still (in the proportion of two or three times to one) breaking up a single line in the middle or at any point of its course. Sense and sound flow habitually over from one couplet to the next without logical or grammatical pause, but to keep the sense of metre present to the ear Keats commonly takes care that the second line of a couplet shall end with a fully stressed rime-word such as not only allows, but actually invites, at least a momentary breathing-pause to follow it. It is only in the rarest cases that he compels the breath to hurry on with no chance of stress or after-rest from a light preposition at the end of a line to its object at the beginning of the next ('on | His left,' 'upon | A dreary morning'), or from an auxiliary to its verb ('as might be | Remembered') or from a comparative particle to the thing compared ('sleeker than | Night-swollen mushrooms'); a practice in which Chapman, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and their contemporaries indulged, as we have seen, freely, and which afterwards developed into a fatal disease of the metre. Keats's musical and metrical instincts were too fine, and his ear too early trained in the 'sweet-slipping' movement of Spenser, to let him fall often into this fault. To the other besetting fault of some of these masters, that of a harsh and jolting ruggedness, he was still less p.r.o.ne. Although he chooses to forgo that special effect of combined vigour and smoothness proper to the closed couplet, he always knows how to make a rich and varied music with his vowel sounds; while the same fine natural instinct for sentence-structure as distinguishes the prose of his letters makes itself felt in his verse, so that wherever he has need to place a full stop he can make his sentence descend upon it smoothly and skimmingly, like a seabird on the sea.[1] The long pa.s.sage quoted from Book III in the last chapter ill.u.s.trates the narrative verse of _Endymion_ in nearly all its moods and variations. Here is a characteristic example of its spoken or dramatic verse. Endymion supplicates his G.o.ddess from underground:--

O Haunter chaste Of river sides, and woods, and heathy waste, Where with thy silver bow and arrows keen Art thou now forested? O Woodland Queen, What smoothest air thy smoother forehead woos?

Where dost thou listen to the wide halloos Of thy disparted nymphs? Through what dark tree Glimmers thy crescent? Wheresoe'er it be, 'Tis in the breath of heaven: thou dost taste Freedom as none can taste it, nor dost waste Thy loveliness in dismal elements; But, finding in our green earth sweet contents, There livest blissfully. Ah, if to thee It feels Elysian, how rich to me, An exil'd mortal, sounds its pleasant name!

Within my breast there lives a choking flame-- O let me cool't the zephyr-boughs among!

A homeward fever parches up my tongue-- O let me slake it at the running springs!

Upon my ear a noisy nothing rings-- O let me once more hear the linnet's note!

Before mine eyes thick films and shadows float-- O let me 'noint them with the heaven's light!

Dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white?

O think how sweet to me the freshening sluice!

Dost thou now please thy thirst with berry-juice?

O think how this dry palate would rejoice!

If in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice, O think how I should love a bed of flowers!--

The first fifteen lines of the above are broken and varied much in Keats's usual way: in the following fourteen it is to be noted how he throws the speaker's alternate complaints of his predicament and prayers for release from it not into twinned but into split or parted couplets, making each prayer rime not with the complaint which calls it forth but with the new complaint which is to follow it: a bold and to my ear a happy sacrifice of obvious rhetorical effect to his predilection for the suspended or delayed rime-echo.

Rime is to some poets a stiff and grudging but to others an officious servant, over-active in offering suggestions to the mind; and no poet is rightly a master until he has learnt how to sift those suggestions, rejecting many and accepting only the fittest. Keats in _Endymion_ has not reached nor come near reaching this mastery: in the flush and eagerness of composition he is content to catch at almost any and every suggestion of the rime, no matter how far-fetched and irrelevant. He had a great fore-runner in this fault in Chapman, who constantly, especially in the _Iliad_, wrenches into his text for the rime's sake ideas that have no kind of business there. Take the pa.s.sage justly criticized by Bailey at the beginning of the third Book:--

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen Their baaing vanities, to browse away The comfortable green and juicy hay From human pastures; or, O torturing fact!

Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight Able to face an owl's, they still are dight By the blear-ey'd nations in empurpled vests, And crowns, and turbans.

Here it is obviously the need of a rime to 'men' that has suggested the word 'unpen' and the clumsy imagery of the 'baaing sheep' which follows, while the inappropriate and almost meaningless 'tinge of sanctuary splendour' lower down has been imported for the sake of the foxes with fire-brands tied to their tails which 'singe' the metaphorical corn-sheaves (they come from the story of Samson in the Book of Judges).

Milder cases abound, as this of Circe tormenting her victims:--